Visiting Lassen Volcanic National Park in the SPRING! (Sulphur Works, Chaos Crags, & Manzanita Lake)

For the last couple days we've been exploring near Redding in northern California in partnership with Visit Redding and we have fallen in love with this area's beauty and for our last adventure we're going to be exploring Lassen Volcanic National Park. Lassen Volcanic National Park is located just an hour east of Redding and it makes for a great day trip or more when you're visiting Redding. The park is known for its hydrothermal activity, lakes, and all four volcanoes found in the world. We're visiting the park in early April and during the winter and the spring the park is mostly closed and there are only two areas you can access. The southwest area by the Comiamani Visitor Center and Manzanita Lake. While we won't be able to share everything there is to do here in the park, we're very excited to experience it in the less busy shoulder season and for our first stop we're going to go check out Sulphur Works which is in the southwest portion of the park. Woo! It smells like hard-boiled eggs out here. That smell is stiff. It'll wake you up, huh? Yeah. Many years ago there was a large volcano here known as Mount Tahama. It was an 11 mile wide 11,500 foot tall volcano whose last eruptive period ended about 360,000 years ago. It has been broken apart and carried away by erosion over time and has left this large basin here and Sulphur Works is located in its general location of its central vent. Sulphur Works is home to mostly mud pots and steam vents and mud pots form when standing water is acidic enough to dissolve surrounding rock into clay. Thermal water beneath the depression causes steam to rise through the ground heating the collected surface water and creating the bubbles. This area just reminds me of a mini Yellowstone. It is super cool and smelly if we haven't said that enough already. Sulphur Works is the easiest of the park's hydrothermal areas to visit. It's just a super short walk from the parking area. It's also the only one open in the winter. If you're visiting in the summertime though there's one spot called Bumpus Hell which is a three mile hike and it looks so cool so we hope to check out that one next time. Another nice thing about this national park is that while the actual campground is closed during the winter they do allow tents to camp in a specific area and self-contained RVs to stay in the parking lot at the visitor center for $10. It's basically unheard of to be able to stay in a parking lot overnight in a national park so it was really nice to be able to stay here for cheap and get an early start for our adventuring today. For the rest of the day our plan is to go to the Manzanita Lake area of the park which is the only other area accessible right now and normally you could drive through the park to get there but due to the closures we have to drive around and we figure since Redding is pretty close by we'd swing by there to grab a quick coffee. We just made a quick pit stop at Evergreen Coffee which is a beautiful coffee shop here in Redding. They have some neat items for sale in there. They have a boutique hotel upstairs and we grabbed a couple horchata granitas for the road. Dang that is so good. So much cinnamon in there. Nice and icy on this warm day here in Redding. Man that is really refreshing. That is an horchata slushy. That is so sweet and so good. Oh dang. I'm not even sure if there's coffee in this but it is so good I'm not even mad. And now back to Lassen. We made it to the Manzanita Lake area of the park. We have two hikes that we want to do here and we're starting with Chaos Crags which is four miles round trip. We originally thought we'd be doing a lot of snowshoeing today but as you can tell there's really no snow on the ground but we hear that there might be snow further up on the trail so we brought our snowshoes and our microspikes just in case. We really have no idea what to expect but we hear that there should be some nice views at the top. It's cold. It's cold. We're coming across more snow on the trail and it's making it more difficult to find the trail. Plus with the snow it's kind of that in-between where you're post tolling your foot's going through the snow but then you can still make 10 more steps and you're just fine so we don't really need the snowshoes. Hiking in snow it's kind of like hiking in sand. You slip a bit, you get your foot stuck, it's kind of hard to move. It's really fun. We're almost to the end of the hike but first we made it to the Chaos Jumble which is a rock slide that happened and these rocks all flew down the side of this mountain right here at a hundred miles per hour just wiping out the forest and eventually ending two miles away. Most of the trail has been forested so far. When you get to this spot all of a sudden you just see all these rocks. You can just look all the way this way and they just keep going and going and going. Even more impressive than the Chaos Jumbles are the Chaos Crags which are a cluster of six dome volcanoes that last erupted about a thousand years ago. They're just very unique to look at because they're just very rocky up at the top and then you've got all this scree of rock just kind of cascading down and you've got knobs of rockiness coming out. It's just a very unique sight. There's also supposed to be a lake right there which marks the end of the trail but it's dry right now so this is where we're going to turn around. We're 1000% coming back to this park in the summertime so we can do more hikes because from what we've seen today this park is gorgeous and there's so many things that we want to do here that we could not access today but we're very glad we visited here in kind of the off season. I think it's one of the first times we've ever done that with a national park. Normally we go during peak season but it's been really cool to see the park in a way that maybe not everyone gets to see it and we've only run into about like 10 people today which is basically unheard of at a national park. We just made a quick dinner to take with us on our last hike of the day the Manzanita Lake Loop which is a two mile stroll around the lake. We're saving the best part of the trail for last for sunset and so we're doing the trail clockwise. We found these picnic tables right on the lake which we thought would be the perfect spot to enjoy our dinner. Tonight we're having a green curry which we've shared before on the vlog. We actually made a whole video with how to make it but the red curry version of it is the exact same thing so we'll make sure to link below the video as well as a blog post we have about the instructions. We decided to put the curry in this Yeti water bottle which I guess means our water will never taste the same again. It'll always be curry water and then just dump it into the rice and the meat. All right! One thing we really wanted to do in the park but it's not very easily accessible at this time of year is to hike to the top of Lassen Peak which is this beauty right here. It's 10,457 feet and it's the southernmost active volcano in the cascade range so we'll be coming for that one on our next visit but this view from this side of the lake is just gorgeous. We've got Lassen Peak over there and then just off in the distance is the Chaos Crags which we just hiked to a little bit ago. This park is really just so beautiful. We're sitting here waiting for sunset and the only noise we can hear are just all the birds, the ducks, the geese just all hooting and hollering away. Just hearing them run across the water. It's just such a peaceful experience. A huge thank you to Visit Reading for hosting us while here in the area. Even with a slight van mishap that we'll tell you more about in our next video, we had the best time here and we already cannot wait to come back and see everything else that we missed. Since our visit to both Reading and Lassen were in the shoulder season and everything we wanted to do wasn't accessible, be sure to check out the Visit Reading website for more things to do in the area and trust us there is tons more to do. But next up for us we are heading to our final destination here in California, the Redwoods. He's using this tripod as kind of like a walking pole and it sunk way down. Now I can't get it out. It's like the MacArthur's stone or whatever. Can he do it? Victory! Strong man! Yeah! Shopping cart, shopping cart, at target, at target.